doobin

6 ply all the way. Can't stand the puncture proof ones, twice as much effort.

So is a new machine for the 5k you’ve wasted on finance...

It’ll be the rejects from cleft fencing!!

The dealer only wants you to buy the Westwood because they sell them... You're almost certainly going to want a diesel model for that amount of mowing.

If you're wanting to realise a value with minimal hassle then biomass or firewood (logs). Anything else is simply not worth the effort, especially with prices as they are currently.

100%, but he's so full of shit he just writes whatever comes into his head first.

That's way too cheap for here in Sussex. I'd want £8+ per m.

I feel lucky to have got fleet renewal sorted last year, everything is sub 3 year old now. Let my outgoing 1.7t go a bit cheap in hindsight, but then I bought the new one cheap too going by today’s prices. Swings and roundabouts.

Grapples are great bits of kit. Mine is old, it’s on its third digger now. Rebushed it once, welded up the tips twice and added a hydraulic back stay. Proper handy, and still in use regularly despite upgrading to a rotating grab two years ago.

The truck is the last thing you should be financing. New vehichles are not really needed unless you are doing 50k miles a year, they don't add to the profitability of the job, and they depreciate like a stone. New machinery, on the other hand, hold it's it's value and makes the job more profitable. I have four new diggers and all kinds of machinery, but my newest truck is an 09 Iveco.

You do- and that's the very reason I changed to clear cans!

I reckon there’s a lot of that going around. Think you’ve dodged a bullet though personally. As you have no access restrictions, you don’t need expanding tracks with the lower ground clearance that entails, especially with your soft banks. Consider stepping up from 2.4 to 2.7t on a proper excavator X frame.

I've never had a mix up but have always been paranoid about it. The best thing I ever did was to shell out (and not much extra either!) for those Stihl transparant petrol cans. The lids are also much better than standard cans, but most importantly it's plainly obvious whether fuel has mix in it or now. Recommended.

Same here. On the farms it’s like the virus doesn’t exist.

As big as a house? Sounds around 50 years old, expect to pay £500-700 to get it removed depending upon location.

It’s a spambot mate 😉

They don't study that in India mate 😉

Artificial separation of companies is very rarely successful.

No idea mate, we are predominantly Brits here.

They will be fine, but unless you NEED wellies, you could save your conscience and your feet by buying a pair of proper boots to work in and be comfy with!

Doubtful. Where the brace stay is mounted is particular to each attachment. Easy enough to weld on though. This was changing the grapple to the new machine- making sure the ram doesn’t ground out extended/closed and with dipper ram extended/closed. I have a different ram for fitting it to the micro as well.

I've not found any electric saw to be really powerful compared to a proper petrol saw. The Makita is value for money though.

A thumb is OK for some stuff, but hopeless for others. A grapple is a good halfway house between the thumb and a proper grab, especially if you make the back half hydraulic. Any time lost swapping to grapple is soon regained by not messing about with a thumb IMHO. A normal fixed (or even hydraulic) thumb is good for big rocks when trenching, any other jobs make it look clumsy compared to a grapple. As the guys above state, the design of the thumb as well as the attachment it's paired with makes a big difference as to what you can do with it, and from this point of view it has merit. However, you've got to have a lot of one sort of work to justify making an awesome thumb/attachment combo up for it, so I stand by my point that a grapple is a much better all rounder for most. If all you are doing is loading firewood, by far and away the best soloution would be a cheap dangle type grab/rotator plus an electronic flow divertor. With a thumb or a grapple, you really need to constantly be at 90 degrees to to pick up/drop off point, which is hard to achieve in reality. Being able to rotate is a game changer, and for dangle mount on a mini digger it's often cheaper than you think.

Is that a worm drive rotator? I know they offer a low profile one but it was a lot more money, in hindsight I should have gone for it with the amount I use the grab. edit- found the original email. The lower profile rotator was 2.4K rather than £900- and from the photo they sent not much of a stack height saved on a 2.7t setup.

I got a 2009 with 120k for 3.5k plus vat. Apparently the engines go on for a good while if you look after them.